November 15, 2024. County Morgue. The plan wasn’t dead on arrival, but it sure wasn’t healthy.

Sleep came and went like a fair-weather friend, trailing nightmares like landmines behind it. Despite that, I still got some rest. Coffee was a must the next morning, and Cassidy was right there with me on that. On the upside, I didn’t have anything new to bandage.

The shop was oddly quiet, with only a few local customers stopping by to browse. It made me jumpy, not having death on the line every ten minutes. Despite my case of nerves, the calm gave us a chance to restock, reorganize, and dust the shop. As the day flew by, Cassidy and I tossed around theories about Valeria, those pens, and that nightjar stalking basically everyone. It was our running conversation all the way to the morgue once we closed shop for the day.

“I still think that Morgana Vale is a part of this,” Cassidy said as we walked up to the Blighridge County Morgue building. “Those Mason jars in the Briarwood basement? I swear those came from our shop.”

“Feels right.” I shifted the backpack of notes to a different shoulder. “It’s just… I don’t know.” I shook my head. “Ever since Dorian said a nightjar can ‘smear’ a person’s memory, I’m not sure what to think. Facts feel like a guess.”

We hesitated at the building’s double glass doors. Cassidy brushed a strand of auburn hair behind an ear, frowning at the parking lot. “Speaking of Dorian, I can’t believe he didn’t want to come along.”

I pulled a door open for her. “Oh, he did. A lot. Kept saying how much he’d love to visit the local ‘meat market,’ but had to deal with a bank issue around Valeria’s accounts. He was at the bank when he called.”

She grimaced. “Ew. What? No. Did he really call the morgue a ‘meat market?’”

I tried to smile it off, but instead I winced. “Yeah, he did.”

Cassidy rolled her eyes, walking inside with me on her heels. “Out loud,” she said wearily. “He said that out loud with his own mouth.”

“Yeah, I know.” I shrugged. “Honestly, I think he means well… sort of. Also, it’s kinda nice he’d rather talk than try to hunt us down in our sleep.”

She softly blew a breath, then gently rubbed my arm. “True.”

In Blighridge County, the morgue was connected to a hospital at least by way of the parking lot. In this case, it was Magnolia Regional, where Cassidy and I had visited one too many times lately. It was a low, one-story building that jutted out behind the hospital like a tan-brick afterthought. The inside was a soft, almost utilitarian, blue-gray with fluorescent lighting. Given it was a morgue, and most of its guests didn’t care about aesthetics, the place managed a fine balance between medically necessary and almost comforting.

After a quick conversation with the front desk staff, we were escorted to the back. Sheriff Branham was waiting with the coroner next to a body half-covered by a white sheet on a stainless steel examination table. The coroner, a thin man with sharp brown eyes and hair graying at the temples, drew his eyebrows together, giving the sheriff a cautious look. Branham pulled his mouth into a thin line as he hooked his thumbs into his belt.

“It’s all right, Doc,” Branham said in his typical, easy, deep voice. “They’re here as consultants. Cassidy? Daniel? First, is this the man who came by your shop?”

We moved closer to the table. The body was skeletal and lean with skin the texture of brittle, tanned leather. Sandy-brown hair had survived whatever had dried him out like a human-sized raisin. Cassidy grimaced. I swallowed as memories stirred. For a moment, I was right back to being inches from Fred Spivey’s dead, desiccated face.

“That’s… that’s him,” Cassidy replied thinly. “He’s the one who came by our shop.”

Branham nodded. Pursing his lips, he glanced down, then over at the coroner. “Thank you for that. This here is Doctor Owen Evans. Doc? Mind telling them what you told me?”

Evans studied us for a moment, then lightly tapped twice on the metal exam table. With a sigh, he shrugged, gesturing to the corpse.

“The closest explanation I have is precocious mummification, even though… that doesn’t happen in a day.” At our startled expressions, the coroner held up a hand. “He was brought in late yesterday. It’s hard to tell, but I’m putting the time of death maybe the day before yesterday.”

“Day before…” I studied the floor as Cassidy shivered. “Cassie, wasn’t that before we went over to the Adelyne house?”

She nodded. “Yeah. Before you were attacked.”

Branham raised his eyebrows at us. “Deputy Keene found him at the Holiday Inn like this. I sent her to track him down and ask a few questions about Amanda Price and other things.” He paused. “Hotel staff ran out when she reached the parking lot. Seems housekeeping found him in bed like this when they went to clean his room.”

“Oh… wow,” I breathed, slowly putting a hand over my mouth.

Doctor Evans cleared his throat, lacing his fingers in front of him. “Well… I also checked the records for similar cases, like you asked, Sheriff. I found a few. At least one almost ten years back. The Amanda Price case. She was like this before the auto accident.”

Cassidy and I stared in unison at the sheriff, his face a neutral mask. He looked away, studying the corpse.

A thought came to me, and I turned to the coroner. “Doctor? I’ve got an odd question. Did you find any ink stains on… uh… Mr. Hayes here? On the fingers? Under the fingernails?”

“No, not a single drop,” Evans replied. “He’s dry as dirt.”

I frowned at that. “Sheriff?”

Sheriff Branham glanced at Cassidy, then me, and tilted his head toward the hallway. He gave the coroner a thin smile. “Thanks, Doc. We’ll leave you to it.” Then he hesitated, giving the doctor a knowing look. “I’ll explain later.”

Doctor Evans pursed his lips, then crossed the room to a small laptop to enter some notes. We walked with the sheriff in silence out into the hallway. Branham let out a long breath as the examination room door closed.

“Doc’s a good man. Knows quite a bit about what goes on, but prefers not to know more than he has to. Says it helps him sleep at night and stay neutral when he works.” Branham ran a hand over his short-cropped dark hair. “This is so much easier when it’s not a paranormal problem.”

“Sheriff? Daniel and I have been wondering about that,” Cassidy said carefully. “With the pens, fire’s probably a really good idea, but this person… ah… turning people into mummies? That feels like a really big problem.”

We walked with him down the hallway until he motioned to an empty meeting room. Filing inside, he shut the door behind us.

“It’s complicated,” he began. I set the backpack down on the narrow table in the meeting room, while Cassidy took a seat. As we did, the sheriff folded his arms and continued. “If I’m lucky, it’s one of the Nighthunters. That bunch can be put on trial like anyone else.”

“What if it’s not one of the Nighthunters?” Cassidy asked, folding her hands in her lap.

“A paranormal?” He shrugged. “That’s tricky. Normally, I sit them down for a talk to find out what’s the problem. If they’ve not murdered anyone, it could be just helping them get settled in. Most just want a quiet life like anyone else, which isn’t hard to arrange. After that? I shuffle around some paperwork, getting it lost in the system.”

“If murder’s involved?” I asked.

“Then it depends,” Branham replied, his voice sad and weary. It was the sound of a man who’d had this conversation once too often with himself over the years. “If they fight, sometimes they get put down. If not? The county has a quiet… ‘arrangement’… with the local Court Viridis for trial and rehabilitation.”

I blinked, opened my mouth, then closed it. Cassidy found her words way before I did.

“Dryads?” she snapped. “Sheriff, you can’t be serious? You’re handing people over to the Dryad Court? That’s a death sentence.”

The sheriff’s expression hardened for a moment before softening around the edges. “Surprisingly, no. Not always. Sometimes they come back a lot better… behaved. Model citizens.”

Cassidy gave the sheriff a brittle look, slowly hugging herself. I pulled my mouth into a tight, hard line as I softly inhaled a breath. The hum of the fluorescent lights in the tiny room filled in the rest.

Branham shrugged again. “I’ve a bad feeling that nightjar won’t go that quietly, but we’ll see.”

I nearly tripped trying to sit in a chair. “Wait. You know it's a nightjar?”

“It’s part of why I asked the Doc to check the old records,” the sheriff replied. “After what happened at Naomi and Issac’s place? I had a powerful concern. Especially when you said the person who attacked you looked like Amanda Price.” He joined us at the table. “A nightjar came through ten years ago, causing all sorts of hell. It killed Amanda Price and a few others. Left them withered to a husk the way Spivey and Hayes died. That nightjar left the county before we could catch it.”

Cassidy put her head in her hands. “Oh, I’ve got a headache.”

“… and nightjars can wear the face of people they kill,” I added solemnly.

Unzipping the backpack, I unloaded the contents onto the table. Papers from Briarwood went in one stack. Valeria’s journals in another. My tablet and the flash drives from Briarwood were last.

“Sheriff? Remember the other night when we mentioned Valeria Moffet’s journals? That she’d been hired?” I turned on my tablet and plugged in a flash drive while Cassidy located the relevant journal pages. “We think that might have been a woman using the name Morgana Vale.”

He nodded, pulling over a journal. “Let me see what y’all have.”

Cassidy and I walked the sheriff through the papers and journals, even the bad parts. He didn’t even blink, which told me a lot about what he’d already seen as a sheriff. After that, I showed him the property records, then the purchase records for the Mason jars. Lastly, we explained what we found in Briarwood’s basement. The chair squeaked as the sheriff sat back with a thoughtful expression, fingers drumming slowly against the table.

“Y’all sure those jars match?” he asked.

“Sure as we can be,” Cassidy replied.

“Hm,” he grunted. “Those pens. That’s a tomorrow problem. Nightjar comes first. This with Morgana Vale is a thin thread, but I’m willing to pull it. What y’all don’t know is the name Morgana Vale turned up in property records ten years ago. Real estate deals. The name had some connection to Amanda Price and the Altamont family.” I started to say something, but the sheriff held up a hand. “I got word before y’all got here that someone matching Morgana Vale wanted to visit Professor Halcomb Barnes in the hospital.”

I exchanged a worried look with Cassidy. “Is he all right?”

Branham nodded. “He is. Deputy Keene said this Morgana took off the moment she saw her. Hospital security shows the woman tried two other times.”

“She’s getting desperate,” Cassidy said. I watched my wife’s eyes dart around, focused on nothing as she ran down the possibilities. “Maybe that’s why she killed Caleb Hayes?”

I drew a deep breath. “That was likely her we saw on our security footage. If she was working with Caleb, that could explain why she killed him.” I squinted at the air above the table. “She’s cleaning up loose ends. Anyone who knew, or could have known, about all this…”

A sudden realization needled my mind. Cassidy’s eyes went wide at the same moment.

“Dorian!” we said simultaneously.

The sheriff grabbed his phone as I grabbed mine.

“I’ll send a pair of deputies over to Ms. Vale’s place of work, then her home if she’s not at her office,” he said.

Nodding, I texted Dorian. His reply was painfully casual, which told me everything.

Cassidy stared at me, then at my phone. “Anything?”

I nodded, setting it down. “He says everything’s right as rain, and he’s eating something at Miss Milly’s. Dorian swears he’ll be careful. No jokes. I’m pretty sure he’s taking this seriously.”

“Good,” Cassidy replied sternly. “Now… what about the nightjar? She… it… can’t be left alone to wander around killing people.”

The sheriff ended his call. “A lure is the best bet, like someplace it frequents. Last place was an old garage that’s long since burned down.”

“Briarwood Estate,” she offered. “Those Mason jars are there. Nightjars use those to… you know… ‘preserve’ what they drain out of people,” she said, grimacing.

“Don’t forget the pens,” I added. Cassidy’s face paled again, but the sheriff looked curious. I continued. “When the nightjar attacked me, I saw ink under its fingernails.” I frowned. “Valeria was cursed by the pens, but was hired to find them. What if the nightjar hired Valeria because it’s cursed, too?”

Branham scowled. “I don’t like involving y’all in any sort of plan like this.”

“Sheriff?” Cassidy said gently, voice tight. “We’ve been involved from the start. Technically, Daniel’s uncle got us involved when he left us the shop.”

The sheriff started to reply, but his phone buzzed. He glared at the message. “That person matching Morgana Vale is at the hospital again.”

Cassidy stiffened, grabbing my hand. Meeting my gaze as if memorizing my face, she blinked with a sad look, then focused on the sheriff.

“Sheriff? I’ve an idea. Get Deputy Keene to name-drop the Briarwood Estate, the fountain pens, and that we’ve figured something out. That we have them there. Just enough for the nightjar to overhear.”

I squeezed her hand back. “If she bites, it gets her out of the hospital and out of public sight. Away from anyone who could get hurt.”

Sheriff Branham studied us for three long seconds, then called the deputy.

“Keene?” he rumbled. “Listen very carefully…”